2. INTRODUCTON
• Sports in US: important part of the country's culture.
• The four major professional sports leagues: Major League Baseball (MLB), the
National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL), and
the National Hockey League (NHL).
• All four enjoy wide-ranging domestic media coverage and are considered the
preeminent leagues in their respective sports in the world.
• All major sports leagues use a similar type of regular season schedule with a
playoff tournament after the regular season ends.
• Sports leagues in the United States are also unique in that they do not practice
promotion and relegation, unlike sports leagues in Europe and other parts of the
world.
• Sports are particularly associated with education in the US, with most high
schools and universities having organized sports.
• College sports competitions play an important role in the American sporting
culture, and college football and college basketball are as popular as
professional sports in some parts of the country. The major sanctioning body for
college sports is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
3. Baseball
• The highest level of baseball in the U.S.
is Major League Baseball.
• The World Series of Major League
Baseball is the culmination of the sport's
postseason each October.
• It is played between the winner of each of
the two leagues, the American League
and the National League, and the winner
is determined through a best-of-seven
playoff.
4. American Football
• American football has the most participants of any sport
at both high school and college levels.
• The NFL is the preeminent professional football league
in the United States: 32 franchises divided into two
conferences. After a 16-game regular season, each
conference sends six teams to the NFL Playoffs, which
eventually culminate in the league's championship
game, the Super Bowl.
• Millions watch college football throughout the fall
months, and some communities, particularly in rural
areas, place great emphasis on their local high school
football teams.
• Nonetheless, college football has a rich history in the
United States, predating the NFL by decades, and fans
and alumni are generally very passionate about their
teams.
5. Basketball
• Of those Americans citing their favorite sport, basketball is ranked second
behind American football.
• However, in regards to money the NBA is ranked third in popularity.
• More Americans play basketball than any other team sport, according to the
National Sporting Goods Association, with over 26 million Americans playing
basketball.
• Basketball was invented in 1891 by Canadian physical education teacher James
Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts.
• The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the world's premier men's
professional basketball league and one of the major professional sports leagues
of North America.
• It contains 30 teams (29 teams in the U.S. and 1 in Canada) that play an 82-
game season from October to June.
• After the regular season, eight teams from each conference compete in the
playoffs for the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy.
• The Dream Team was the unofficial nickname of the United States men's
basketball team that won the gold medal at the 1992 Olympics.
• Basketball at both the college and high school levels is popular throughout the
country. Every March, a 68-team, six-round, single-elimination tournament
(commonly called March Madness) determines the national champions of
NCAA Division I men's college basketball.
6. Ice hockey
• Ice hockey, usually referred to in the U.S. simply as
"hockey". In the U.S. the game is most popular in
regions of the country with a cold winter climate.
• The NHL is the major professional hockey league in
North America, with 23 U.S.-based teams and 7
Canadian-based teams competing for the Stanley
Cup.
7. Soccer
• Soccer has been increasing in popularity in the United States in recent
years.
• Soccer is played by over 13 million people in the U.S., making it the
third most played sport in the U.S.
• Most NCAA Division I colleges field both a men's and women's varsity
soccer team, and those that field only one team almost invariably field a
women's team.
• The United States men's national team and women's national team, as
well as a number of national youth teams, represent the United States in
international soccer competitions and are governed by the United States
Soccer Federation.
• The U.S. men's team is one of only seven teams in the world to have
qualified for every World Cup since 1990. The U.S. women's team
holds the record for most Women's World Cup championships, and is
the only team that has never finished worse than third place in a World
Cup.
• The U.S. women beat Japan 5–2 in the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup
final to claim their third Women's World Cup title, and first since 1999.
8. Golf
• Golf is played in the United States by about 25 million people. The
sport's national governing body, the United States Golf Association
(USGA), is jointly responsible with The R&A for setting and
administering the rules of golf.
• The USGA conducts three national championships open to
professionals: U.S. Open, U.S. Women's Open and U.S. Senior Open.
The PGA of America organizes the PGA Championship, Senior PGA
Championship and Women's PGA Championship.
• The PGA Tour is the main professional golf tour in the United States,
and the LPGA Tour is the main women's professional tour.
• Golf is aired on several television networks: Golf Channel, NBC, ESPN,
CBS and Fox.
9. Tennis
• Tennis is played in the US in all five categories (Men's and Ladies'
Singles; Men's, Ladies' and Mixed Doubles); however, the most
popular are the singles.
• The pinnacle of the sport in the country is the US Open played in
late August at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in
New York. The Indian Wells Masters, Miami Masters and
Cincinnati Masters are part of the ATP World Tour Masters 1000
and the former WTA Tier I (currently Primer Mandatory and
Premier 5).
• The United States has had a lot of success in tennis for many years:
Don Budge, Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Monica Selec,
Chris Evert, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, and
Pete Sampras dominating their sport in the past. More recently, the
Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, have been a strong force in the
women's game, and the twin brothers Bob and Mike Bryan have
claimed almost all significant career records for men's doubles
teams.
10. Music in the US
• The development of the arts in America has been marked by a tension
between two strong sources of inspiration - European sophistication and
domestic originality.
• American popular music has had a profound effect on music across the
world.
• The country has seen the rise of popular styles that have had a significant
influence on global culture.
• These are ragtime, blues, jazz, swing, rock, bluegrass, country, R&B, doo
wop, gospel, soul, funk, heavy metal, punk, disco, house, techno, salsa,
grunge and hip hop.
• Distinctive styles of American popular music emerged early in the 19th
century, and in the 20th century the American music industry developed a
series of new forms of music, using elements of blues and other genres of
American folk music.
• These popular styles included country, R&B, jazz and rock.
• The 1960s and 1970s saw a number of important changes in American
popular music, including the development of a number of new styles, such as
heavy metal, punk, soul, and hip hop.
11. African American music
• In the 19th century, African-Americans were freed from
slavery following the American Civil War.
• Their music was a mixture of Scottish and African origin,
like African American gospel displaying polyrhythm and
other distinctly African traits.
• By the end of the 19th century, minstrel shows had spread
across the country, and even to continental Europe.
• In minstrel shows, performers imitated slaves in crude
caricatures, singing and dancing to what was called "Negro
music", though it had little in common with authentic
African American folk styles. An African American variety
of dance music called the cakewalk also became popular,
evolving into ragtime by the start of the 20th century.
12. Blues
• Blues is a native American musical and verse
form, with no direct European and African
antecedents of which we know.
• The slaves sang songs telling about their
extreme suffering and privation.
• The blues was mostly sung in the South and
only spread northward in the 1930s and 1940s
with the migration of many blacks from the
South.
• The 1920s saw the blues become a musical
form more widely used by jazz
instrumentalists.
13. Jazz
• Jazz originated in New Orleans early in the 20th century,
bringing together elements from ragtime, slave songs, and
brass bands.
• Jazz was the reigning popular American music from the 1920s
through the 1940s.
• In the 1930s and 1940s, the most popular form of jazz was
"big band swing," so called after large ensembles conducted
by the likes of Glenn Miller and William "Count" Basie.
• In the late 1940s, a new, more cerebral form of mostly
instrumental jazz, called be-bop, began to attract audiences.
• Rhythm & blues was a combination of jazz and other “race”
music with the lyrical content, sonic gestures and format of the
blues. The epoch of rhythm & blues spans the late 1940s to the
early 1960s.
14. Rock
• The melding of rhythm & blues with country and
western music in the mid-1950s gave birth to rock
and roll.
• To make the new music more acceptable to a
mainstream audience, white performers and
arrangers began to "cover" rhythm and blues
songs- singing them with a toned down beat and
revised lyrics.
• At the beginning of his career, Elvis Presley
covered black singers. Soon, however, Presley was
singing original material, supplied by a new breed
of rock and roll songwriters.
15. Folk Music
• A challenge to rock appeared in the form of
folk music.
• Folk music was based largely on ballads
brought over from Scotland, England, and
Ireland; it had been preserved in such
enclaves as the mountains of North Carolina
and West Virginia.
• Bob Dylan extended the reach of folk music
by writing striking new songs that addressed
contemporary social problems, especially the
denial of civil rights to black Americans.
16. Country Music
• Like folk, country music descends from the songs
brought to the United States from England,
Scotland, and Ireland.
• The original form of country music, called "old-
time" and played by string bands, can still be heard
at festivals held each year in many southern states.
• Modern country music developed in the 1920s,
roughly coinciding with a mass migration of rural
people to big cities in search of work.
• Like many other forms of American pop music,
country lends itself easily to a rock-and-roll beat,
and country rock has been yet another successful
music merger.
